The Hype Machine – a meta music blog portal

The Hype Machine is a super cool idea. A kind of Digg-like meta music blog portal which tracks other music blogs and features tracks from them which can be played directly from the front page. Visitors get a chance to sample some of the cool music being blogged about and if they’re really interested they can visit the source blog and get more. You can also add tracks to a favourites list, buy tracks and there’s even a new music radio on-site. Nice, very nice indeed!

The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page. Some of the frequently accessed tracks are cached by the Hype Machine server, much like Google Search caches web pages, to reduce load on the bloggers’ servers and protect their bandwidth. Those tracks are NOT available for download, but you can preview them via the play buttons that are next to each track. The blog that posted a particular track is identified under every track by name so you can read more about why they posted it. If you enjoyed a track someone posted, stop by and let them know!